Summary: IEE UK Low Power Forum, September 1998, Sheffield, UK, pp. 7.1­7.5
Low Power Implementation of Direct Form FIR filters on DSPs
T. Arslan and A.T. Erdogan
Cardiff University of Wales
Cardiff School of Engineering
Cardiff CF2 3TF, UK.
ARSLAN@cf.ac.uk, ERDOGAN@cf.ac.uk
I. ABSTRACT
In this paper, the authors propose a multiplication scheme for low power implementation of FIR
filters on DSPs incorporating the traditional MAC unit. The proposed scheme is more flexible than
competing schemes, since it can be adapted easily to most common DSPs in the market without the
need for any modifications to their architecture. The scheme has been used with two common FIR
filter realisations. The authors show that the scheme can achieve up to 23% savings in power. The
paper presents the scheme, outlines its implementation using an example and demonstrates results
with different filter orders and wordlenghts.
II. INTRODUCTION
The increase in demand for portable multi­media devices in the past few years has led to the
emergence of low power design techniques [1]. Digital signal processing systems are crucial parts of
the above devices and are the most computationally intensive. For this reason, a lot of research has
targeted the low power design of DSP systems. The techniques have targeted power reduction at